Ray Kelly, the head of the NYPD, is just so full of shit. His police department has a massive "stop and frisk" program which, by the NYPD's own statistics, is existentially programmed to stop and frisk hundreds and hundreds of thousands of completely innocent young black and Latino men with no real cause. It is a minority dragnet, so blatantly racist that not even the police chief can quibble on that point. He can merely say: it's for the black people's own good.

The NYPD's "stop and frisk" program has garnered criticism in the past, in part…
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This is Ray Kelly's latest desperate attempt at political stop-and-frisk jujitsu (which, I guess, could be interpreted as an improvement from the NYPD's standard "fuck you" PR response): he seizes on the offense-as-defense strategy by attacking the very communities that are being routinely harassed by the NYPD with the stop and frisk program. The NYPD's official news media outlet, the NY Post, of course, leaps for any opportunity to scold minorities on behalf of the cops:

Kelly griped that while others complain about the policy, "Who will speak out about the elephant in the corner, which is the inordinate level of violence that exists in many of these communities?

"I think there should be an outcry that 96 percent of the shooting victims in this city are black or Latino,'' he railed after a Police Athletic League event in Harlem, according to the NYPD. "There should be a huge outcry, but there isn't.

"There doesn't seem to be any major community response. Or demonstrations. We have not had a demonstration about this 3-year-old child. We haven't had a demonstration about the level of violence. We've had demonstrations about virtually every other issue in this city except the level of violence, particularly in certain communities.

The launching board for Kelly's comments were remarks from the parents of a three year-old Brooklyn boy who was shot in a playground recently that more stop-and-frisks could have prevented their son's shooting. To trot out traumatized parents to further one's political cause is no different from finding a 9/11 family to tout your political party, or the grieving parent of a killed soldier to speak up on behalf of a war. It's predictable and rather craven, a rhetorical trick in which one assumes that propriety will prevent anyone from disagreeing with the victims in question. And that may be true. But we feel free to disagree with Ray Kelly himself.

2. If black people agree to hold some protests against violence, then will the NYPD agree to quit stopping and frisking them for no good reason? Seems fair.

3. Better yet, why not go ahead and put all the black people in jail, proactively? This could drop black-on-black crime by up to 100%. I don't see why this shouldn't receive loads of support in... certain communities.